Pages

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Interview with Poet and Translator Julia Leverone

In keeping with our exploration of the writing life and all its obstacles, we had a conversation over email with the writer Julia Leverone, whose poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, Asymptote, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere, including eighteen translations of Paco Urondo's poems. She is also pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis and is editor of Sakura Review. Below, we discuss the juggling of a variety of literary hats while somehow continuing to put words to paper.

TWB: As a poet, translator, editor, PhD candidate, and educator,
which one of these hats do you don most often when introducing yourself at a
party? Which combination of labels do you most identify with?

JL: This is a good question. It’s inescapable! What do I tell
people I am? I don’t know that I’ve ever taken stock of this.

I would say I am most frequently a PhD student. This is easy
for me to turn to, because I’ve been an enrolled student since something like
age 3. I know all too well how to be one. It’s also (very soon, finally) going
to be something I am not, and I’m already moving on from that hat. When someone
asks what I do, increasingly I say I teach. It’s true in that it occupies the
majority of my time—but I’m still coming around to feeling that it describes
me, because it was only in the past few years that I began doing it and, more
recently, thinking that I could pursue it with success.

However—and this is when I’m around people who I think could
take it (and, sometimes, when I think they should)—I’ll go for the
poet/translator hat. It’s what I prefer, or the poet-translator-intellectual
trio. These things draw from what’s most important to me to be able to do, for
myself and in the world. And they fuel my work as a teacher, an editor.

TWB: Describe the perfect combination of circumstances that makes
writing happen in your life.

JL: Writing comes best when I’ve been stricken with something
from the outside: a piece of writing, a phrase, a few bars of music or lyrics,
or a compelling image or idea. This can arrive at any time, as you know well.
But it can also be induced. I can pick up a book or go on a long drive or hike
and come out of it ready. After that, I don’t need much time to process the
thing that produced the impulse, not to get thoughts onto the page. I do need
space and quiet to let my mind play with it just afterwards, that kind of
opening John Cleese argues we need. I like writing in the late afternoon. I
like the pressure of the diminishing daylight.

Sometimes, of course, I can’t get to a space or to the quiet
(teaching/home duties also produce a kind of noise) right away. There’s a
pleasure to that, having to chew on something for a few days. Fatally, the
attractiveness of the thing can sizzle out, though. Those losses plague me as a
poet.

TWB: When there are obstacles to writing (and there are always
obstacles), what brings you back to it? What do you do to get yourself back
into that space when there are gaps?

JL: Beyond what I was talking about just above, I think it’s crucial
to me to be plugged in to a network of others who are also writers. Some forego
Facebook or Twitter because of the clutter. I like being able to sift through
the feeds for reminders that I’m not alone—and that I’m expected to pull my
weight. I am sure that these notions are largely invented on my part; my sense
of how I fit in especially so. But I need to feel that I have competition, that
other writers are out there doing it, getting it done, and excellently.
Recently, I was listening to Susan Bernofsky speak on a translation panel, and
she was describing how to manage students’ creative production in the classroom
when designing translation workshops. She said something like, “we have to
demand of ourselves (speaking inclusively of students and all translators) the
absolute best”—and then we revise, and make our work even better. That is our
job as writers. Feeling like I am among writers who challenge themselves (yes,
it counts when I read posts about moms struggling to write just as much as
posts about publication successes!) holds me accountable to do the same.

By the way, going to conferences, though they are so, so
expensive for grad students/adjunct teachers, is a major boost for
community-feeling.

Too, keeping up a cycle of submissions brings me back. This
is probably the most consistent method I have for reminding myself that I am a
writer being seen. Getting rejections (and less-frequent acceptances)—even if
the work concerned feels pre-historic when those emails come rolling in—helps.

I’m also grateful to have a partner who is a writer (as if
that’s the only thing he’s good for!). We’re able to talk poems (and teaching,
&c.) and understand each other. We’re sensitive to each other’s writing needs
and worries. It skips a lot of negotiating and explanation!

Okay, so there are lots of ways in which I practice returns
to the task of writing. Being an editor of a literary magazine contributes to
this as well. It’s not reading submissions, but discussing them with Adam
Pellegrini and Michael Gossett that renews my critical-creative tools that I
bring to revising and planning my own work. Like with all of my other answers
to this question, sensing that I should write and need to overcome obstacles to
writing—I’m considering, here, the larger/compounded ones—is a matter of being
involved with other people who are writers.

TWB: What’s inspiring you right now, in any medium (not just the
written word)?

JL: Hmm. Multiple things, always. Spring. Aging. Pine resin. The
dirt on glaciers. Those frighteningly massive, shifting flocks of birds that
pass over the highway. I’m also preoccupied with the idea of Texas and its
wideness. It’s been just long enough, I think, for me to have a grasp on what
it means to live here in this state/in the south, but to also not have ready
explanations.

TWB: Where are you finding surprisingly good writing? Anything on
your night stand?

JL: It’s all about recommendations, for me. Mostly these come
through Facebook plugs. I wish I could give you a hot new source to run to!
Well, I suppose I can—I signed up for Small Press Distribution e-mails and get
SPD Recommends in my inbox regularly, which sometimes I have the time and
attention span to peruse, sometimes not. It’s given me a few good leads. Also,
writer-ladies, the binders groups on Facebook. There are searchable posts with
hundreds of comments below them specifically making book recommendations.
That’s how I picked last summer’s entire reading list (note: prose).

Right now I’m reading Kelly Link. I had read Stranger Things
Happen for a class once, and ate it up. A friend recently asked for book gifts
for her bridal shower to develop her and her new hubby’s library, so I bought
her Link because it’s right up her alley, and noticed the author has new work
out. It’s baller.

As the editor of the lit magazine Sakura Review, what are
your thoughts about what takes a piece of writing from almost published /
barely rejected to being definitely published? What’s the difference between
super close and all the way in?

I was just reading a submission this morning that nearly
made it; great, rich language, incredible images, detectable sense, a fine arc,
but she didn’t deliver it at the end. Very often what the submissions we read
need is to take themselves away from themselves. To carry the work forward into
a complicating, perhaps reflective, but new idea.

I don’t mean to say that those submissions actually need to
be wholly different poems in order to be successful. It’s a question of scope.
Are they too focused, insistent? Maybe the authors should (literally) step
away. Then consider how to have the poems travel elsewhere. The poems we love
at Sakura do that kind of leaping that can be so astonishing and, at the same
time, unmistakably necessary.

TWB: What do you find most gets in the way of the writing life?

JL: Grading. Oh my goodness, grading. It’s a biweekly monster
and it’s unfun, so it’s an easy scapegoat. Also, my dissertation (another
beast), but exclusively my anxieties around it—I am finding writing it to be a
creative outlet that takes care of my need to be exploratory and precise with
language in varying ways.

TWB: How do you get in the zone when you are there? Is it music,
is it a space, a series of habits?

JL: I envy people who can fall asleep anywhere and in any
way—with limbs in the air, balled up on the floor, in the middle seat on a
plane—but I’m fortunately not picky with writing spaces. As I was telling you
above, I can zone-induce by picking up a book (of poetry, or whatever the mode
is I’ll be writing in—critical works for my dissertation, for example). It
doesn’t take much. Usually just one or two leafings and I’ll have found what I
didn’t know I was looking for.

You discussed this in your first interview, and I believe
others use coffee and taking care of small chores to set off a time and energy
in which they can write. I think in a way my preference for the afternoon
presumes these steps. Also a factor I’ve noted in establishing my zone is
hunger, or at least not being full. Is that too informative, or expected? Even
with writing this, I had gone to the kitchen for a banana before I started and
have not yet touched it. And I’ve tried, but typically writing with wine
doesn’t get me far. I don’t know if I envy writers who can do that.

TWB: We hear a lot of fiction writers say that they read poetry
before writing fiction as a way of focusing. It makes sense, they're concise,
vivid, and stir you up. As a poet, do you ever seek out fiction for some
writerly reason? If so, does it ever carry over into your art?

JL: You know, no, I think that poetry is specially equipped in
this case (poetry wins!). It’s a brief form, as you say, and it’s transportable
and more immediately evocative. So I read poems to write poems.

That said, I relish fiction or any creative prose for
immersion and the lengthy opportunities to allow my mind to develop ideas that
do and don’t relate in a discernible way to the text. Of course this type of
processing carries over into what I write. It carries over into my life, into
what I say to people.

TWB: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten about writing? What do
you know now that you wish you could tell yourself back when you started doing
it?

I can’t tack down who it was who first told it to me, or
told it to me the time that it really stuck, but the advice to not force a poem
if it just can’t be one is among the best. That if the circumstances—the
language or images in my head, the feelings or interpretations I’m holding
around parts of the poem—are just not cooperating, scrapping that writing and letting
it remain as a fragment is okay. Repurposing these bits, scribbled thoughts,
parts of old drafts, is crucial to making dense, careful, and good poems later
on. And it’s important to just write, as well as to trust the process and let a
piece do what it wants to do.

I don’t know if I’d tell my teen poet-self anything now,
because it’s lovely to have figured things out in stages, and to know I’ll
continue learning about writing and doing. Is that selfish? Can it be selfish
if I’m withholding from a former me? Besides, I wouldn’t want to throw me off
course and rupture the space-time continuum. We’ve all seen that show.

In all seriousness, I bring new meaning to advice with every
writing experience. I’m constantly re-contextualizing claims about the writing
process and its implications for me, my life. I don’t think that’s rare, but
part of being cognizant and a functioning, adaptable human.